ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the development of Sons and Lovers from the Kunstlerroman of ‘Paul Morel II, inspired by Lawrence’s recent reading of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, to the cultural critique of the finished novel, grounded in the new knowledge of the Oedipus complex given him by Frieda Weekley. It offers different ways of assessing how far Lawrence had got with ‘Paul Morel’ II when he met Frieda, and concludes he was about to write the most oedipal scene in the novel, the Friday night scene. After a survey of relevant critical opinion the chapter argues that Sons and Lovers is the first Freudian novel in English, but with two important reservations: that Lawrence believed the main damage done to Paul Morel, as to himself, was pre-oedipal, and that the origins of that damage were not universal and inevitable but cultural and contingent. Lawrence’s theme was not infantile sexuality but the sexualisation of infancy through parental seduction. Both differences place Lawrence closer to Gross than to Freud. The chapter also discusses the autobiographical play The Married Man, in which Lawrence passed his first judgement on himself and Frieda Weekley in the light of her espousal of the sexual ethic of Otto Gross.
